


seem(ed) like the real thing

by orderlyhouse



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crack, Crowley Was Not Raphael Before Falling (Good Omens), Crowley is Raphael except he isn't. Yes he is, Crowley's fuck shit up jacket, False Identity, Gen, Humor, M/M, POV Third Person, Secret Identity, Undercover, a/c in the background if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:48:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23724094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orderlyhouse/pseuds/orderlyhouse
Summary: An angel shows up in Heaven to fix a pipe and inspire a union.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 128





	seem(ed) like the real thing

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what else to tell you, you just read the tags and there's not enough fuck shit up jacket content.  
> Title: Blondie - Heart of Glass

Asael was not having a good day.

Not a day, precisely. Time, in its human concept, barely existed in Heaven, but according to the variety of the clocks showing time across 24 major time zones, past 48 hours have not been good for them.

It wasn’t their fault the assigned cupid missed her target at the market and instead hit a monk who’d only come down from the mountains an hour ago after six months of seclusion and decided to drop it all for a ten-minute chat. The fact that Asael had somehow been made responsible for it and now had to search human social media for the next cupid assignment to make up for this disaster made it even worse.

Now this.

The last staff training would have been a nightmare material if angelic host ever needed sleep, but Asael had no intentions of repeating it, no, they just wanted to know who in Heaven’s name they needed to smile so much at, considering that canonizations had become so rare and the saints used direct channels.

“Hi,” they attempted to smile at what presented as a mortal man (but obviously could not be anything human since it was in these walls, not anymore, at least), “how can I help?”

The being landed a yellow toolbox on the reception stand. “I’m here to fix a pipe,” he said.

Asael hadn’t heard about any pipes recently. “A pipe?” They asked.

“Yeah,” the being said, as if it was something announced at the meeting just yesterday, “the dodgy pipe somewhere around here. Didn’t you need a plumber?”

Oh, a plumber! That was an angel, then!

“Oh, of course!” Asael straightened to look around for the papers he needed to fill in. They had no idea, nor any record about who called for a plumber last and when, but they reasoned that it had to be expected with every angel having a corporate phone, and Heaven had dodgy pipes all the time despite all the technology around.

“Sorry,” they muttered when the pause got a bit too long, but pulled out a clipboard and a pen a second later, “you just need to fill in your name and the, uh, time and location of your last port of departure.”

The angel nodded and got to writing.

Asael pressed the “hold” button on the landline phone. They should’ve been probably getting to it sometime, but right now they were close to beating the previous record: almost ten thousand callers on hold. Ten thousand school kids asking to pass the test, clerks wanting a promotion, words of gratitude, and occasional bedroom talk that managed to seep through the audio filters. Asael wasn’t sure the reception phone was even needed, considering that there was a department responsible for more serious queries and direct messages to the deities, but the duty to check the seriousness of the remaining calls was still theirs, just like it had been for the past ten years.

There was a brighter side, however: another phone on the reception desk had been remaining silent for quite some time now. Asael _really_ didn’t like when it rang. One of the last times it did, they put principality Aziraphale to speak to Metatron, and later were told off by one of the archangels for not holding him on the line longer. That wasn’t really the worst part, taking into the account the draft while considering that _Asael_ had been created merely two thousand years ago and served civic duty mostly in the office, but somehow it was.

The very last time it had rung an angel had to be sent to collect Archangel Gabriel, who “just wanted to talk” about the possibility of Aziraphale leaving it all behind and coming back Upstairs, and ended up with his face scratched and nose made bleeding by a demon that lived with the principality.

“You alright?” The angel asked them, still writing, “You look tired.”

“Eh,” Asael said, distracted, trying to find the visitor log file, “just lots of work.”

“Ah, I see,” he passed them the clipboard back, “still no days off for decades?”

If this whole situation was off the script already, the last line had to be something scribbled by a non-dominant hand on the margin. For the first time since the elevator doors opened, Asael truly _looked_ at the angel in front of them.

The colour scheme was off, for starters. The white dress shirt that had become softer with time barely went with his tight black jeans and coarse orange jacket several sizes bigger. It didn’t match either his long red hair (that, in turn, didn’t match the place: in Heaven, you either had short hair, no hair, or long hair made neat), nor the dark sunglasses he was still wearing indoors that were probably covering his golden eyes while on Earth, and Asael couldn’t stop thinking about seeing the same shirt on Aziraphale the last time he had stomped out of Heaven, but they figured that angelic stock had to have something in common, and if that was fashion sense, so be it.

“Er,” Asael had to abruptly remember that it was considered rude to stare, so they got back to with finding the angel’s profile to fill out visitor log, “just one and a bit, really. Not a single day since the adversary showed up, and you know, with all the aftermath.”

They shouldn’t have been telling all of this to the first angel they’ve never seen before, but bless it, the day could be considered busy if at least five people passed the reception, and Asael could consider themselves lucky if at least one of them was another overworked office angel.

“Better than some,” the angel – _Raphael_ , as it read alongside _London, 3 p.m._ – said sardonically, but didn’t receive a response. A moment later, while Asael was still searching the database, he said, “Don’t you have someone who can speak up for you in here? About the working conditions and all.”

Asael had heard about the unions, of course, but they mostly heard about the attempts in Hell that failed because they could never manage to find a representative who wouldn’t quit right before the negotiations meeting.

“No, we don’t,” they answered, “I don’t think the higher-ups would like that.”

“Yeah, they like to exploit you lot while doing nothing and getting credit for all the work at the end of the day,” Raphael almost deadpanned. Asael silently asked for the profile to come up faster – there was, technically, CCTV in the hall, but nobody knew if it had any sound or if it ran at all.

“You should talk to the others,” he continued, “They can’t brush all of you off. Didn’t work with me.”

Curiosity finally took over, and Asael was looking at him again.

“You’re in a union?” They asked in a lower voice.

“’Course I am,” Raphael said with scandalised certainty, “you just can’t live on Earth without standing up for yourself sometimes, can you? You know about animal packs, right?” he asked, and Asael nodded, “It’s practically the same. Have you heard how a herd of rats took down the entire mobile network in London some years ago? Alone they’d be just dealt with.”

“Is that so,” Asael said, feeling a bit lost, “I’ll think about it.”

Where was his blessed profile? Asael was straining their eyes, looking through the list with hundreds of names starting with R.

They sniffed.

“Smells evil here,” Asael muttered and didn’t proceed with the thought, too engrossed into studying the list.

“Oh,” Raphael pushed himself half a step back from the stand, “I was in the lift with Asmodeus. Awful fellow.”

Asael didn’t ask him to elaborate, because no one needed to know that they occasionally shared a cigarette with some demons outside the building. A couple of them had told Asael about another Earth demon, the one they can never track down in their records because he’s been coming down rarely and only when the archivist was away from their awfully disorganised workplace (“ _There’s barely enough electricity to light the offices, computers just won’t cut it. We have one, I think, from the 90s or something, but we can’t even turn it on without having a three-day blackout”_ ). Even though Asmodeus had been so _nice_ and _polite_ no one could try to come up at him about his very untypical for Hell behaviour (and light tone wardrobe) without being shown their place in the same _nice_ and _polite_ but very convincing manner right that instance.

Still, soon enough all the attempts stopped, because not only had Asmodeus been _nice_ and _polite_ and caring about the demons’ working conditions, but after each of his visits the highest-ranking demons (who never saw him as well) managed to acquire an allergic reaction as if they had been genuinely blessed, along with a misfortune like their chair or table breaking right underneath them.

Needless to say that nobody ever saw anything, but Asmodeus was always very welcome by Hell’s working masses, even if the majority had never seen him but developed somewhat of a religious belief in his existence based on the tales off a few of the others.

Smoking was just an excuse for chatter with someone who understands, though. Asael had picked it up in the 1950s, but not because Gabriel, not even a one-time smoker, was very impressed by tobacco companies’ CEOs and their work on promoting the product. He’d figured out that nicotine was having negative consequences on human body way before they did, but Asael wasn’t bothered. One deserved some bad habits for working late hours, especially if they were an immortal being who didn’t even have a physical body.

Besides, Aziraphale had once said that humans took put-out cigarettes for shooting stars and made wishes on them, and Asael thought it rather sweet.

“Why can’t I find your records in the system?” Asael addressed neither themselves nor Raphael. “Have you been up there often recently?”

“Not really,” Raphael shrugged, “it’s all probably on the paper. Look,” he checked his very hi-tech, but obviously human-made watch, “can I just go do my thing already? I’m kinda short on time, got some stuff to get to. I’m gonna come back to sign off or something.”

Asael contemplated the possibility of not looking through single people’s friend lists on Facebook for some more time and agreed.

Unlike Hell, Heaven didn’t have an archivist. Most of the information was already digitalized, and the angels were expected to be organized enough to put the remaining bits on the shelves they were taken from.

Asael came back to the reception with a thick file and started reading.

There was no picture. Just his name at the top left corner in copperplate writing, no ID number or other ridiculous part of any previous sorting system Heaven had ever had throughout the entirety of his record.

That wasn’t even the strangest part of the whole ordeal. For someone whose workplace had little to no information on, Raphael had surely been doing his Earthly duty well: the first entry referred to the period when time was still being figured out, followed by 5000 years of miracles and blessings.

According to the visitor log there, Raphael really hadn’t been coming around often, last time being at the dawn of the 1990s, and it made sense why his records were absent from the database. No receptionist had enough admin rights to create a new profile, nor anybody knew who actually did have these rights, and with the Y2K affecting systems in Heaven and only there of all places in the universe, a rarely used file could as well be left out of being digitalized.

Half an hour or more must have passed before Raphael came back, and Asael had to stop reading around 1200s to sign him off, and he only shrugged at the notion of the number of his miracles had been quite high ( _“Just my job, you know”_ ).

An hour after Raphael left Asael finished reading his file and sighed, opening the Facebook tab again.

Another hour later Gabriel showed up. Asael barely held back from rolling their eyes at the sight of a weekly garment bag with yet another tailored piece in his arms.

“How are you getting on?” The archangel asked them ten minutes later, sans the bag and certainly trying to make an impression of being productive after not doing anything today at the very least, “Anyone came round?”

“No,” Asael said, because the answer was usually “no”, but then added after remembering, “oh, no! I mean, yes, there has been. Raphael was there.”

Gabriel frowned. “Who?”

“Raphael?” Asael repeated, but his expression didn’t change. “He was here about the leaking pipe? Said he’s assigned to Earth.”

The pause was brief, but it was still there. “Are you sure?” Gabriel asked with condescension, and Asael decided to proceed with the thing they had been thinking about since finding Raphael’s file.

“Yes,” they pressed and gave him the file.

Gabriel started to flip through it leisurely, but soon enough his expression became stricken, and Asael decided to act.

“Gabriel,” they said with all the courage they could muster, “I want a vacation for all the days off I didn’t have in the past twelve years.”

Gabriel gave them a quick side-glance, but before he could say anything Asael hastily let out, “I spoke to some people from the accounts and they said they wanted the same.”

That was only a half-lie. No one had ever said anything out in the open, but everyone working in the office was aware of the others’ burnout.

It was fine, though. Platoon angels hadn’t been doing anything for millennia, and there was enough of them to replace the whole office with a couple of days’ worth of training.

Asael thought that about spending this vacation on Earth. They could go and take a look at Aziraphale’s rumoured bookshop and his demon husband, and if he’s anything like the demons Asael encountered so far that would be amazing.

Gabriel seemed to prepare to say something, but instead fell silent, reading into the papers and muttering, “Yes, fine,” and then, after a pause, “Where did you get these?”

“From the archives,” Asael was thinking about how maybe they would meet Raphael too, considering that he seemed to inhabit London.

Gabriel frantically turned page after page, stopping to read a line or two from time to time before he halted completely. He looked as if something had dawned on him, as much as it could be said about someone like Gabriel who never listened to anyone beside himself and the higher ranks.

“Asael,” he said in a mortified voice, raising his shocked eyes from the papers, “we lost a fucking angel on Earth!”

Three days later, unknown to Asael at the time, a well-hidden pipe caused flooding in Gabriel’s office.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](https://polkanote.tumblr.com/)


End file.
